Discussion
Paper

Professor Arthur Sale, Research Coordinator, School of
Computing

2004 August 6, Version 1.0

Executive Summary

This document proposes the
urgent establishment of an eprint website for the University
of Tasmania, and suggests corresponding
policies for discussion. A mandatory self-archiving policy for research output,
and a mandatory policy for archiving theses are suggested for discussion and
implementation over several years. A School
of Computing prototype website
temporarily codenamed ‘UTasER’ can be viewed at http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au/
and illustrates the type of information that an eprints website will hold. Present
document contributions are mainly from the School
of Computing, but trial documents
have also been entered by the Library. An Eprints server will increase the
research impact of UTas
research output by 3-5´, and is considered an essential part of the research
strategy being undertaken in the School
of Computing.

What are eprints?

An eprint is an electronic version of a paper,
article or thesis, preserved in an archive and searchable and retrievable
globally. The word encompasses preprints (versions of a research article
distributed before refereed publication) and postprints or reprints
(copies of a published article distributed apart from the journal or poceedings
in which they appeared). An eprint server is a server on which all or most of
the research output of an institution is mounted, and which provides search and
browse capability to find particular papers. Such a server is a useful addition
to a university'sprofile, but not
particularly valuable by itself. You have to know about it to search it, and
few people outside Tasmania will.

To be really value-adding, an eprint server must comply
with the standards of the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting(OAI-PMH), and be
registered with global OAI harvesters such as scirus (http://www.scirus.com/),
myOAI (http://www.myoai.com/) and OAIster
(http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/).
These provide global search services for research publications for all
registered institutions, for example OAIster currently has data on 3.3M documents
from 307 universities and research organizations worldwide. There is small
value in institutional searching and only slightly more for national level
searching; the Internet is a global medium.

As part of the research strategy for the School
of Computing an eprint server has been
established, and is proposed as a prototype for the University
of Tasmania. To view the
look-and-feel of our eprint server, view it at http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au/.
At the date of writing this prototype contains 17 documents: journal papers,
conference papers, a newspaper article, Honours theses, PhD theses, and
unpublished technical reports. One technical report (this document) is
available as HTML and other formats; it has also been updated several times
since its first upload. The others are available in PDF as their primary format.
These documents have been contributed by staff and students of the School
of Computing, or solicited to
exercise the software capabilities and provide some idea of the possibilities
to members of the University.

To get some experience with an eprint server, point your
Internet browser to the prototype server and search for the key phrase 'spread
spectrum', or search for the author surnames 'Malhotra' or 'Cook'. This
prototype has been registered with only one harvester (OAIster) pending a
decision on a university server, and has been registered with the Institutional
Archives Registry. It passes all the OAI-PMH protocol validation tests. Once
the once-a-month harvesting schedule takes effect, its documents will be
searchable globally, including via Yahoo. Try also viewing scirus or OAIster
(URLs above), and searching all linked universities for something or someone
interesting to you; if your mind is blank try 'spam filter'.

You cannot reasonably comment on this proposal
until you have some experience of what it might offer; to assist you this document
itself is uploaded to the prototype server as HTML http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000011/
. Download the HTML version and you will have a set of live hyperlinks that can
take you directly to the places on the Web mentioned above and scattered
through this document.

The author is willing to give a brief talk and
demonstration of eprints (including the prototype server and OAI browsers) on
request to Arthur.Sale@utas.edu.au.

Benefits

There are many benefits of an
eprint website for the University of Tasmania.
The most significant to academics, RHD students and other researchers are the
following which align firmly with the EDGE agenda, and with the School
of Computing research strategy.

·Our research output (where legally possible) is
made publicly available, globally, free, and at the time of creation. It is not
restricted to an institution, country, journal, or by ability to pay. Only
Internet access is required.

·The self-loading of preprints on the server provides
prima facie proof of priority of the research findings. This is
especially important for research higher degree theses and is a win-win
situation for postgraduates working on cutting edge sciences and technologies
for both theses and papers submitted to journals and conferences.

·Global searches through OAI-compatible search
engines bring our research and researchers more easily to the attention of
other researchers worldwide.

·All the above increases our research impact very
significantly.

Besides these, there are many
more peripheral or long-range benefits that are unlikely to strongly motivate
academic staff yet which may resonate with the Academic Senate and senior
management. These include:

·The Group of Eight universities have a project
to install open access (eprint) archives in all of their membership. At the
time of writing only four servers at Melbourne (www.unimelb.edu.au, 273 documents), Queensland
(http://eprint.uq.edu.au/, 875 documents),
ANU (http://eprints.anu.edu.au/ 2000 documents)
and MonashUniversity
(http://eprint.monash.edu.au/, 33
records) are operational. The University
of Tasmania regards itself as equal
with these universities. QUT (142 documents) and Curtin (81 documents) also have
operational servers, as does ALIA and the National Library of Australia, making
9 in total in Australia
including ourselves (17 documents).

·No university anywhere has access to the entire
world's research. The Open Access Initiative is aimed at making access to
research output readily available to all. Working with this initiative
incidentally assists in combating the serials pricing crisis.

·Some disciplines are already highly electronic
in their dissemination practices, primary examples are Theoretical Physics and
Computing. This trend can only be expected to continue, and an eprint archive
will assist the University in maintaining a leading edge reputation.

·The initiative is an operation driven by
standards, where global interoperability is seen as vital.

All the above
indicate that an eprint server for the university containing a high proportion
of our research output would create a major change in the dissemination
effectiveness of the University’s research (=‘research impact’). It is tragic that
the University is not yet exploiting nor even considering this opportunity.

Implementation Barriers and
Counter-Arguments

Direct Costs

The direct costs (cash) are minor. The prototype eprints
server is mounted on the same server used by the School
of Computing for many other
purposes. A dedicated server with adequate disk space for records for several
years and a better response time would cost say $5000. However, a fully
operational server could be mounted initially on an existing University web
server computer.

The EPrints software proposed to be used (http://www.eprints.org/) is completely free
under a GNU open source licence, as are updates and all the supporting software
(Apache, mySQL, Perl, etc). Registration with OAI harvesters is also free.
Searches performed on harvesters such as myOAI and OAIster are free apart from
Internet traffic costs. The software is widely used by universities for this
purpose and there is an active support forum. Over 50% of the world's
university repositories use Eprints; its only serious competitor is DSpace. The
diagram shows the rate of growth of global deployment of Eprints technology
recorded by one registry.

Indirect costs

Indirect costs are more significant and can be broken down
into technical support costs, server supervision, and upload costs.

Technical support by ICT personnel

The initial implementation effort for the prototype has
been supplied by the School of Computing.
The implementation could be easily transported to another server with minimal
staff time (our effort is under 1 person-week in ICT support). There will
however need to be some work put into customizing the site to suit the
University's visual standards and desired user interface. Other university
sites offer examples. This need not be a large task (say another person-week),
indeed could be minimal and evolve with the site. Depending on the upload
solution adopted, it might be desirable for IT Resources to write a module to
interface to the University LDAP server so that all research staff have
automatic upload registration on the server with their email username and
password; this might require say a week's work at most. Ongoing technical
support by ITR should be minor, and mainly concerned with security, updates and
backups.

If the later proposal to interact with ADT through an
eprints server is implemented there will also be a small amount of work
required to reformat the thesis data in a form harvestable by ADT, since the
ADT refuse to harvest in a standards-compliant manner. One or possibly two
weeks work is estimated.

Server supervision by information
specialists

The server will require supervision by someone with a
research or information science speciality from the Library. Regular monitoring
will be required to approve uploads, and monitor the quality of the service and
the status of the server. Depending on the take-up of the facilities, this
might be a moderate or a relatively light load. An upper bound estimate of the
effort can be made by assuming that the entire research article output (~2000/yr)
and thesis output (~130/yr) output of the University is uploaded to the server
annually. Research articles should require ~30s on average to approve, and
theses ~5min on average to upload; totalling maybe 30 hours/year.

Uploads

Creation of content is the
province of academic staff and RHD candidates. However, there is the additional
step of submitting the content (preprint files and in some cases postprints) to
the server. Three basic self-archiving models are possible, but combinations
are of course possible:

1.In
one, the researcher uploads the file and enters the bibliographic information.
Experience suggests that the work may be 5-10 minutes with a small amount of
experience of what is required. This is a tiny fraction of the work involved in
producing the paper, and would seem negligible in order to get 3´
increased citations. However in other institutions it has been seen as a
barrier because it simply does not get done. It is extremely hard to get
academics to do work without deadlines even if it clearly to their benefit.

2.In
a variation on this theme, one person in each school is responsible for the
uploading. This could be the person responsible for PES data entry since much
of the information is required by them anyway. Entry would be smoother, quicker
and more reliable, at the expense of some extra liaison with the academic and
workload for the responsible person.

3.The
ultimate in centralization would be to have a single institutional person (or a
team) do the uploading, with the academic simply emailing the papers to him/her/them.
This has the ultimate in consistency, but also requires a significant change to
the duties of the person/team. Seeking additional information not initially
supplied by the academic in the email would constitute a significant part of
that load. The option also exists to spread the workload around various subject
editors. The Library is best placed to pick up this responsibility.

Participation

The implementation of an eprint
server is easy (as we have proved); the hard part is getting anywhere near 100%
participation by researchers and coverage of institutional output. This can be
readily seen by the performance of Australian institutions with eprint servers
(from less than 40 documents at MonashUniversity to a respectable 2000 at
ANU). For comparison, MIT has 8000 theses and 4000 papers; DukeUniversity's Historical Sheet Music
Archive has 17 000 records. To save rewriting what others have already
experienced, here is what the eprint FAQ says about this problem:

“How can an institution facilitate the filling of its Eprint
archives?

5.Offer trained digital librarian help in doing "proxy" self-archiving, on behalf of any authors who feel that they are
personally unable (too busy or technically incapable) to self-archive for
themselves. They need only supply their digital full-texts in word-processor
form: the digital archiving assistants can do the rest (usually only a few
dozen keystrokes per paper).

6.A policy of mandated self-archiving for all refereed
research output, together with a trained proxy self-archiving service, to
ensure that lack of time or skill do not become grounds for non-compliance, are
the most important ingredients in a
successful self-archiving program.
The proxy self-archiving will only be needed to set the first wave of
self-archiving reliably in motion. The rewards of self-archiving -- in terms of visibility , accessibility
and impact --
will maintain the momentum once the archive has reached critical mass. And even
students can do for faculty the few keystrokes needed for each new paper
thereafter.)

7.Digital librarians, collaborating with web system
staff , should be involved in
ensuring the proper maintenance, backup, mirroring, upgrading, and migration
that ensure the perpetual preservation of the university Eprint Archives.
Mirroring and migration should be handled in collaboration with counterparts at
all other institutions supporting OAI-compliant Eprint Archives.”

Copyright

Wherever an eprint server is proposed, many respond ‘But I
can't do this, because the journal/conference I publish in won't let me.’ This
is largely untrue, and there is an extensive literature on the reactions and
the common objections, which have been canvassed ad nauseam. A recent survey indicates that 83% of scholarly
journals (up from 50% last year) approve self-archiving. See the 'I worry
about...' section at http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
and the following summary.

In brief, the research and the paper belong to the
academic and/or the employing institution prior to publication. At the pre-acceptance
stage, the author (or the institution depending on IP policy) is free to do
whatever they want with it. Indeed in many disciplines there was a healthy
trade in paper preprints of research articles until electronic archives took
over – the most significant examples are Theoretical Physics and Computer Science,
but there are many others in the sciences and technologies. In other
disciplines a paper preprint culture never took off, especially in the
humanities and the medical sciences. Regardless of the prior existence of a
preprint culture, there is no legal
or copyright barrier to mounting preprints on an institutional server, right up
to the point where the article is accepted and the publisher asks the author to
sign an agreement.

If a publisher states that an article will not be
considered if it is mounted on a preprint server, this is simple
anti-competitive coercion by that publisher. The author is free to accept the
conditions or to publish elsewhere. Such pre-conditions are becoming more and
more unusual as publishers adapt to ICT technology impact, but they still exist
in some disciplines.

At acceptance stage, all publishers of journals or
conference proceedings ask for assignment of copyright or some form of
copyright license. In the majority of cases the exact form of this is more a
matter of tradition than legal requirement, and the publishers (for example Nature)
are increasingly happy for preprints and/or postprints to be mounted on a
personal website or institutional eprint server, usually as long as they are
acknowledged as published in the publication. Indeed in the computer sciences,
some publishers will provide the postprint PDF file exactly as printed in the
paper journal or conference proceedings for the author to mount personally (for
example the Journal of Research & Practice in Information Technology).
These practices increase the profile of publishers and are a reaction to the
increase in electronic access to scholarly literature. The number of journals that
allow some form of self-archiving or open-access is increasing (estimated
at 83% of scholarly journals in 2004, sample of 10673 journals). For an
introduction to the literature on this topic see http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids.

Other objections

Another common objection is that the Internet is already
congested and has too much information, so why add to it? This is nonsense. The
Internet does not yet contain as much information as there is in print, yet we
do not worry about adding to that body of knowledge. However, everyone would
welcome access to more precise and more reliable search tools to find the information
that they want on the Internet, and it is precisely this problem that
the OAI addresses. Searches of scirus, myOAI and OAIster are the scholarly
equivalent of Google: they search a global and growing database of information
restricted to websites that advertise themselves as providing scholarly
information, and which are moderated to accurately represent themselves. The
value of such facilities is enhanced by increasing numbers of OAI-compliant (300+)
servers operated by universities, including only nine in Australia.

Another objection that is
sometimes heard is that preprint files are second-class information; the only
thing that should be published on the Internet is the fully refereed paper that
which has been validated by experts. Of course, such a criticism cannot be
levelled against postprints or RHD theses, which eprint servers also provide.
Few editors (of which I am one) of scholarly journals would be so rash as to
make this claim; the quality of the refereeing process is well-known to us to
be patchy and under increasing stress as more and more experts decline to
undertake refereeing tasks. However there are two even more cogent replies.

·Eprint servers do not only provide copies of
documents, they are surrounded (like e-journals and other electronic media)
with other forms of validation and refereeing. For example, many papers are
found not through searching but by citations, their inclusion on key papers
listings, and links on other websites. All of these are a distributed form of
refereeing. Some eprint websites also accumulate comments added to the papers;
a form of democratic refereeing similar to book reviews. CiteSeerhttp://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
provides invaluable information to the computer sciences through its analysis
of eprint documents, search facilities for citations, and identifying top
publications for research impact.

·Secondly, the evidence strongly suggests that
readers do not have the same view about the uniqueness of a refereed paper that
authors and research directors sometimes do. They are often satisfied to read
an earlier version of the paper if they can get it more conveniently than a refereed
version; even more so if the author mounts a long version of a published paper.
Sometimes just the abstract will satisfy them, or surprisingly just a text-only
version without diagrams. Enough in any case for the 200-1000people who actually read the average
scholarly paper (the best available estimate) to decide whether they want to
study it further or seek/order a journal published version. Both these issues
are canvassed with valuable statistics about online usage in Odlyzko, A M, Learned
Publishing, 15(1) Jan. 2002, pp7-19, also available at http://oberon.ingentaselect.com/vl=5313651/cl=38/nw=1/fm=docpdf/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/s2/p7
(as published) and http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/rapid.evolution.pdf
(preprint); a ‘must read’ for anyone with a view on this topic, positive or negative.

It also needs to be emphasized that an eprint server as outlined
here has no necessary connection with the PES (Publication Entry System) used
by the Research & Development Office, though it might be possible to upload
eprint data to PES records for extension with SEO, category and other
information. It also has no relation to any University budget exercise in the
distribution of the Research Quantum; the eprint archive places no relative
values on different forms of research output. However, it has been suggested
that the WARP records could be extended to include a link to the full text of
the publication in an eprints server, which is a good idea which could be
explored further.

E-theses

The foregoing discussion has concentrated on the mounting
of research articles (‘papers’) on an eprint server. Many of the same arguments
apply to theses, with even more force, as another form of research output. Research Higher Degree theses are practically
invisible on the global research record; the canonic copy resides in the UTas University Library and is
catalogued therein, but the catalogue entry is not indexed by any international
service, and the contents of the thesis are extremely unlikely to be accessed
outside Tasmania. The same situation occurs in reverse: if a UTas researcher identifies a
thesis that may be of interest, the first problem is to identify whether the
title (or abstract) is sufficiently interesting to warrant the time and expense
to request photocopying of 200+ pages or the making of an obsolete microfiche.
In all probability (and I have seen many examples in the School
of Computing), the thesis is never
consulted. In response to this many universities have commenced mounting
electronic copies of RHD theses on an OAI-PMH compliant server, with the result
that

·The author, title and abstract are available on
global search engines, and

·depending on any third party embargo, the full
text is available, free, online.

Clearly the University
of Tasmania ought to be moving this way, as fast as
possible. It is already a long way behind many other universities in developing
e-thesis policies and procedures. The benefits to RHD graduates are that
their thesis is virtually published and their research priority in a discovery
or finding can be legitimately asserted; and the thesis is much more likely to
be cited in their own and others’ work. Of course the same copyright issues do
not arise as with research articles: the copyright in this University clearly lies
with the author subject to restrictions from a third party who might have
funded the research or provided data.

The University has actually started consideration of
e-theses, and is a sleeping partner in a CAUL/UNSW project known as Australian
Digital Theses (ADT, see http://www.adt.caul.edu.au/)
with a deadline of becoming an active participant in Feb 2005. This project
however has its problems:

·The ADT central repository is not OAI-PMH
compliant, and the data provided by the participating universities is not
accessible on OAI harvesting search engines, nor is ADT willing to harvest from
OAI-PMH compliant repositories (I asked). Regardless, UNSW has just acquired
the surprisingly large sum of $540,000 from the Australian Government to achieve
OAI-PMH central repository compliance in the future (our prototype has achieved
it, now, with $0 in grants). Compliance for institutional repositories does not
seem to be on the horizon of ADT as it may undermine the need for the project.
ADT participation will therefore achieve little in the way of global exposure,
at least initially.

·The software used by ADT is badly written, and
dates from 1997. The opinion of some members of ITR (with which I concur) is
that it is insecure and should not be mounted on the University’s servers. I
would not ask for it to be mounted on the School
of Computing servers.

·In any case the aim is misguided. There is only
minor extra value to the University (or other universities) in participating in
an Australian database of theses; the aim should be for its e-theses to be
directly linked into the global network and accessible via global searches.

·The ADT software disallows anything other than
PDF files of the thesis text as printed. The planners have not realized that in
the digital era theses may be accompanied by computer program listings for
downloading, music scores and recordings, art videos, etc.

However, this
commitment to ADT can be turned to the University’s advantage. Mounting its
e-theses on an OAI-PMH compliant server such as Eprints will allow the
University to serve its theses up to both
ADT (thus complying with its prior agreement and policy) and direct to global harvesters. Our theses then become more accessible than other Australian
universities participating now in ADT, rather than less as at present). In
order achieve this end, with the Library and ITR’s consent, I established
an ad hoc working party to look into
the option of mounting the University’s theses on an Eprints server (either the
same as for articles or a separate one – there is little difference). This
working party met on 22 July (minuted) and further meetings are planned.
Accordingly, policies related to e-theses should be considered in the same
context as research articles, and this has been done in the recommendations and
the appendixes.

Recommendations

To implement a publicly accessible eprint server and get
high participation as quickly as possible requires speedy implementation of
some policies while others can take their time through the University system. Academic
Senate is asked only to approve only the following three recommendations R1
(general principle), R2 (prototype endorsement) and R3 (referral for comment)
at this time. Other draft policies are referred for comment (see next section).

R1Academic Senate endorses the general
principle of an eprint server, and requests the cooperation of the corporate
sections of the University, in particular the Library and Information
Technology Resources, in implementing such a server.

R2Academic Senate endorses the continuance of
the prototype trial of an eprints server, and encourages other schools and
individuals to voluntarily contribute their research output. Academic Senate
notes that the School of Computing is the interim administrator of the server.

R3Academic Senate refers this paper to the
Faculties, the Board of Graduate Studies, the Tasmania University Postgraduate
Association, the RHD Unit, the Web Development Office, the Library, ITR, and
the Research & Development Office for discussion. Comment is to be received
in time for the Senate meeting on 22 October 2004.

Further actions for referral and discussion

Overall responsibility

Since the implications of this
scheme span the Library, research and academics generally, a distributed
responsibility is desirable. The following has been discussed with the
University Librarian.

A1Responsibility for the implementation
of an eprint server and the mounting of the University's research output on it should
be assigned jointly to the University Librarian and the Pro Vice-Chancellor
(Research).

A2The Librarian and the PVC(R) should be
advised by a small steering committee appointed by the Academic Senate, since
this is a matter of academic significance.

Time-frame

The sooner that this scheme is
operational the better, as the GO8 universities have a head start of about two
years. Several of the existing Australian servers have been in operation for a
year. Note however that the need for an eprint server is not yet built in to any
University Plan, nor the performance criteria of the individuals who might be involved.
There do arise occasions when the delays inherent in these procedures need to
be bypassed, and this is one of them. This timeframe has been discussed with
the University Librarian and is considered feasible.

A3Early
in 2005, the University Library in consultation with stakeholders and a
Steering Committee would implement a central server, migrate existing files,
and commence a program to encourage voluntary participation by Schools and
individuals. A target for voluntary participation by academics in uploading
research documents by end 2005 is suggested as 40% of all research output.

A4Towards
the end of 2005, consideration would be given to continuing the voluntary
program or making the responsibility for uploading mandatory for 2006. The
target for participation by academics in uploading research documents by end
2006 is suggested as 70% of all research output.

A5In
both 2005 and 2006, policies and procedures would be put in place to meet the
same percentage targets for RHD theses, though in this case the aim should be
to require the candidate to submit a complete or near-complete electronic copy
of the thesis to the RHD Office.

A6Following
achievement of the 2006 target or at an earlier time considered appropriate the
steering committee will be disbanded and the ongoing responsibility for the
service vested in the University Library.

Appropriate policies will need
to be discussed and agreed, if a high level of academic participation is to be
a reality. Organization of additional workload or implementation effort will
also need to be considered.Appendix 1 — Draft
Research Eprint Policy

1.The University
of Tasmania's policy is to maximise
the visibility, usage and impact of its research output by maximising online access
to the research for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.

2.It
is also the University's policy to keep to the minimum the effort that each
researcher has to expend in order to provide open online access to his or her
research output, but as far as possible to devolve the loading of research
output to the researcher who is responsible for it.

3.The University has accordingly adopted the policy that all research output that is legally
permissible is to be self-archived by researchers in a University EPrint
Server.

4.This
policy will be progressively implemented over 2005 and 2006, so that by end 2006
all publicly accessible research output is uploaded to the server at the time
of writing and publication. Responsibility for the implementation and oversight
is assigned to the University Librarian and the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research)
jointly.

5.Publicly accessible research output includes all
refereed journal articles and conference papers/short papers/poster
presentations; all unrefereed conference papers/short papers/poster
presentations, newspaper articles, books and research monographs, book
chapters, and theses of graduating RHD candidates. Optionally, researchers may
include long versions of published papers, errata, internal technical reports.
Publications under a permanent or temporary embargo because of third party
sponsorship are of course excluded as full-text entries, but should be included
as entries containing just abstracts, titles, keywords, etc.

6.The
thesis submission rules should be altered to require the provision of an
electronic version of the thesis at an appropriate time (refer to Board of
Graduate Studies and see later appendix).

7.This archive will form a comprehensive record of the
University's research publications, and the University commits to referring to
it in the University's Annual Report and Research Report. [Note that the
archive goes beyond the information entered into PES, which will continue for
Commonwealth and budget purposes.]

Suggestions regarding
implementation

One of the key matters for
discussion is Policy 3 above. The evidence from existing archives suggests that
voluntary participation yields low participation rates, and the University will
fail to meet its objective. Policy 3 suggests that participation is required
for all research output. However, this should be phased in over a year, with
the Library conducting training sessions for each school, and establishing a
proxy-service desirably in the school but within the Library as a backup to
assist researchers who are unable to or unwilling to load their our research.

·The University should not require the full text
of books or research monographs to be uploaded. It is sufficient
to archive a reference along with the usual metadata.

·PhD and research Master theses should
be archived at the point that the candidate is approved for graduation. The
uploading should be assigned to either the Library or the RHD Unit for
implementation. Thesis submission guidelines will need to be revised so that
candidates provide a complete (or near complete) electronic version of the
thesis in an acceptable format. Restricted access theses will be uploaded with
a restricted access policy, to be modified when the reason for the restriction
expires (exactly as at present for paper theses).

·Research papers submitted to
journals and conferences should be uploaded as a preprint at the time of
submission. Following revision, acceptance and publication, a revised record
should be stored if the publisher's policies permit (see below).

This policy is compatible
with publishers' copyright agreements in the following ways:

·The
copyright for all unrefereed preprints resides entirely with the author(s) and
the University before it is submitted for peer-reviewed publication, hence it
can be self-archived irrespective of the copyright policy of the journal to
which it is eventually submitted. There are no legal issues. Publishers may
however exert anti-competitive coercion.

·In
case the author has signed a restrictive agreement in which he/she has voluntarily
agreed to give up their IP rights and not to self-archive any preprint, the
author is encouraged to self-archive a version of the research findings in a
long form different from the paper submission., or just a title and abstract.
The IP and its disposition resides with the author at this point, and copyright
resides in the expression not the idea.

·The
copyright for the peer-reviewed postprint will depend on the wording of the
copyright agreement which the author signs with the publisher, and self-archiving
of the postprint will depend on this agreement.

·Many
publishers allow the peer-reviewed postprint to be self-archived (eg American Psychological Association).
The copyright transfer agreement will either specify this right explicitly or
the author can inquire about it directly. If the author is uncertain about the
terms of your agreement, a table of copyright policies is available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php.
Wherever possible, the author is advised
to modify the copyright agreement so that it does not disallow self-archiving.

·In
case the author has signed a restrictive copyright transfer form in which he/she
has explicitly agreed not to self-archive the peer-reviewed postprint, the
author is encouraged to self-archive, alongside the already-archived preprint,
a 'corrigenda' file, listing the substantive changes the user would need to
make in order to turn the unrefereed preprint into the refereed postprint.

·Copyright
agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As
far as publishers are concerned, an eprint archive is a part of the
University's infrastructure for the author's personal homepage.

·Some
journals still maintain submission policies which state that a preprint will
not be considered for publication if it has been previously 'publicised' by
making it accessible online. Unlike copyright transfer agreements, such
policies are not a matter of law but simple coercion by the publisher. If the
author has concerns about submitting an archived paper to a journal which
maintains such an anti-competitive submission policy, please discuss the matter
with the University's IP Adviser.

Appendix 2 — Draft RHD Thesis
Policy

This draft policy does not
pretend to be explicit, nor final. Rather it sets out some desirable principles
for discussion from which a policy can be formed. The intention is to enhance
the visibility of theses, which is a win-win situation for both the graduate
and the University. Text in italics at the end of each point is an explanation.

1.During 2005, RHD candidates will be
encouraged to submit their RHD thesis in an appropriate electronic form as well
as hard copy.[There must be few if
any candidates who still submit typewritten theses, so the only significant
issues are whether all the components are assembled into a single e-form or
whether the paper thesis is assembled from printouts of various files,
photographs, and other records. A trial year will provide time for experience,
and the benefits of eprint archiving should be amajor incentive for some to participate.]

2.From January 2006, submission of an
electronic form of the thesis will be mandatory. [If the e-form is mandatory, its production becomes part of the thesis
writing and production, and simplified because it is no longer an “add-on”.
Photographs and other information will also be e-assembled rather than paper
cut and pasted (or inserted as pages). Significant advisories will need to be
developed, and maybe there should remain a sunset clause provision for
“near-complete” e-forms.]

3.“Near complete” e-forms should be
acceptable in the early stages. As the name suggest a near complete e-form
contains the vast bulk of the thesis, certainly all the text, but may be
missing some parts which are considered too hard to integrate, such as a
photocopy of a published article, a complex set of high-resolution photographs,
etc.[Such e-forms are likely to be
almost as valuable to the reader as the full thesis, which can then be
retrieved if the missing pieces are desired. The eprint record would identify
the document as “incomplete” and give details.]

4.At some time in the future (possibly 2007)
submission of a bound hard copy for the University Library will be no longer
required.[Once the e-form is mandated
to be required, the only continuing justification of shelving hard copies of
these is for the default long-term archival
value of paper records. They are hardly ever accessed at present and will be
even less so once e-forms are available and adequately archived.]

5.The Board of Graduate Studies and the RHD
Unit will arrange for appropriate training and assistance to candidates in
developing their publishing skills to make this possible.[It should be seen as an essential part of
research training to be able to produce a research monograph in e-form.]

6.Consideration should be given to allowing
candidates to optionally submit their theses only in electronic form from 2006.[This has workload benefit for the
candidates in producing only one form, and mirrors the real world where few
researchers assemble paper copy any more. In addition there are major benefits
for the candidate in being able to use colour diagrams, graphics and
photographs, and even to include animations and videos. The option might be
used in frontier technologies, sparingly at first. It is too early to make
e-submission the norm though some universities are moving this way or have done
so.]

QUT staff and post-graduate students produce
research and scholarly output as a contribution to their discipline and/or as
part of scholarly discourse. A significant proportion of this is intended for
publication for the general purpose of recognition and impact. The following
policy applies to this process, only where such output is not intended for
commercialisation or individual royalty payment or revenue for the author or
QUT. In effect it applies to the corpus of refereed research literature,
conference proceedings, and other non-refereed output, as contributed by QUT to
the outside world

1.3.2
Policy

Material which represents the total publicly
available research and scholarly output of the University is to be located in
the University's digital or "E print" repository, subject to the
exclusions noted. In this way it contributes to a growing international corpus
of refereed and other research literature available on line, a process
occurring in universities worldwide.

The following materials are to be included:

refereed research articles and contributions at
the post-print stage (subject to any necessary agreement with the
publisher);

refereed research literature at the pre-printed
stage (with corrigenda added subsequently if necessary at the discretion
of the author);

Material to be commercialised, or which
contains confidential material, or of which the promulgation would infringe a
legal commitment by the University and/or the author, should not be included in
the repository.

1.3.3
Responsibility

Uploading of material to the E-print
repository is the responsibility of authors and researchers, as advised and
supported by the University Library. Responsibility for management of the
repository rests with the University Library.

Where authors or researchers maintain home
pages, links should be provided to the article or document which has been
submitted to the University E-print repository.

1.3.4
Operational Guidelines

Guidelines specifying the lodgement points and
the process to be followed for lodging materials in the E-print repository are
available from the University
Library . Guidance on Copyright arrangements and standards for publishers
is available from the University
Copyright Officer . The Director, Library Services will report annually
through the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning
Support) to University Research and Development Committee and the Office of
Research on the status of the E-print repository.